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Promenade
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Up in his high ranges Roddy heard of the war at last; and when the prospector bringing the news lay rolled and sleeping in his blankets Roddy faced himself, as each man must do at least once in his life. Man, thought Roddy, is the animal who wants to know, and his own desire to know what it was all for seemed stronger than that of his fellows who mostly took their lives—and wives—where they found them.
Working out the brute, that was what he was doing up here. Pioneering with his mind and spirit into the great mysteries which had bothered him ever since he nearly saw God in burning Kororareka. Sometimes on those pure dazzling snow-heights he nearly saw him. Sometimes he could feel about him in the silence that vast, steadily-beating pulse of immortality. Sometimes page 352 the reason for everything, for himself, seemed just on the point of becoming clear. But since the brute was still very lively in him at times, he knew what would happen if he went back.
Perhaps that's the reason for monks and nuns and hermits, they run away from temptation, he thought. That didn't seem so very fine. Perhaps he wasn't very fine either. Not near so fine as he thought.
He got up and walked into the bush. Not like anything in the luxuriant North, this scant stunted bush with its dark birches standing apart, strowing the ground with small hard slippery leaves always dropping and yet never baring the tree. The fuchsia was the only New Zealand tree that stood naked for the winter. Roddy had seen it reluctantly shedding its fading crimson and gold into the rivers, stripping itself before the cold. Nature, strangest woman of all strange women, seemed more immortal in this land of evergreens, and Roddy, struggling for his own immortality, felt that certain parts of him were lustily evergreen too.
Hastily he got out his flute to exorcize this mounting fierce desire. But the flute, it seemed, would only play “La Paloma,” that deathless Spanish love-song. Sweet ghosts of purer dreams could not reach him through the throbbing insistent call. While the moon went down behind the great white ranges Roddy played himself out of being a hermit, played himself back into the world.
All the way down now he was meeting men—and some knew what they were after and many did not. The usual hoi polloi of a gold-rush: clerks and dainty aristocrats; Russians, Scandinavians, eager Americans, tall sinewy Australians who knew their own gold-fields and never spent themselves for nought. A giant came walking from Dunedin with a bag of flour on his shoulders, selling it by the pannikin to gaunt and wolfish men starving with cold….
Further down were the big camps, with all the claims page 353 marked out and gold being steadily won. But still up into the wilderness went the restless seekers after the fairy pot of gold. Perhaps that's all I've been doing, thought Roddy, not very sure of anything by now, hurrying on to Dunedin.
By nature a douce little town of Scotch elders and churches, this Dunedin; now a riot of miners and camp-followers, and the elders couldn't do anything about it, though Roddy heard that they had held solemn meetings against allowing the miners in. Gold brings pollution, said the elders. So it did, a merry John Falstaff pollution, full of singing and dancing and lusting in the taverns, with strong drink to take the chill out of a man's soul. Police everywhere in couples for safety to each other, and dead men occasionally in threes. And what could the police do on stumbling over a corpse in dark alleys but enter it up in their books as “Died by an act of God under suspicious circumstances”? Roddy, having witnessed some of the suspicious circumstances, quite understood their difficulty.
He went North at last on a whaler bound for Wellington, and a jovial crowd drove to Port Chalmers in a bullock-cart to see him go. They waved gay shawls and scarves and black bottles, and Roddy kissed his hand to all and twice to American Sue. Something cracked in his pocket as he fell into his bunk, but it was the next midday, with the whaler lurching through a choppy sea, that he pulled out the halves of his broken flute.
“So that's the end of you, you wheedling devil,” said Roddy, throwing the pieces through the port-hole. “I'll get an accordion and play ‘God Save the Queen’ now.”
Being a hermit was a childish game.